Saturday, April 14, 2012

BREAKING NEWS (AP) - Newt Gingrich is recovering from
injuries after a brief but brutal encounter with Reality.

Gingrich was continuing his hopeless presidential
campaign, speaking at events not covered by the press and to rows of empty
seats, when the confrontation occurred. Gingrich told police that he didn't
recognize his assailant at first because this was the first time he has ever
faced Reality. Reportedly, Gingrich suffered dope slaps and a wallet
with his Tiffany's charge card was taken in the attack.

Gingrich said he heard the words "oily,"
"narcissistic" and "has-been" during the face-off.
Gingrich's wife Callista was also being treated after Reality shouted to her
"He's probably cheating on you too."

Former candidate Rick Santorum issued a statement
saying he's not sure if he has ever been in the same room with Reality but he
would continue to avoid it as long as he can.

“The
Current is Stronger’: Images of Racial Oppression and Resistance in North Texas
Black Art During the 1920s and 1930s ” in Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D.
Wintz, eds., The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western
Experience (New York:
Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011)

“Dallas,
1989-2011,” in Richardson Dilworth, ed. Cities in American Political History (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011)

(With
John Anthony Moretta and Keith J. Volanto), Keith J. Volonto and Michael
Phillips, eds., The American Challenge: A New History of the United States, Volume II. (Wheaton, Il.: Abigail Press,
2012).

“Texan by
Color: The Racialization of the Lone Star State,” in David Cullen and Kyle
Wilkison, eds., The Radical Origins of the Texas Right (College Station: University of Texas
Press, 2013).

He
is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history
of African American culture, politics and black intellectuals in the Lone Star
State called God Carved in Night: Black Intellectuals in Texas and the World
They Made.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Reasons why Mitt Romney
will lose to Barack Obama 357- 181 in the Electoral College this presidential
election, barring an economic disaster between now and November:

1. Romney's a dud as a
candidate - boring, insincere and he says stupid, out-of-touch things.

2. Christian conservatives
will vote for Romney, but they won't campaign enthusiastically for a Mormon. An
enthusiasm gap will favor Obama because women are pissed of at the GOP

3. The whole "Sandra
Fluke is a slut" thing will come back to haunt the GOP in a big way, as
will the punitive anti-abortion laws pushed by the Republican Psrty. Women will
be a larger part of the electorate, and they are already a majority. They will
vote for Obama in larger numbers than even in 2008.

4. Latino turnout will be
larger than in the past. The ID laws and vicious anti-immigrant legislation written
by the GOP will create an enormous Latino backlash.

5. Black people will still
vote by a 92-8 margin or bigger for Obama and I predict a bigger black turnout
because of the clear racism the GOP has shown Obama.

6. The GOP presidential
primary gave a rich mine of damaging videotape the Obama campaign will exploit
in a vast air campaign - Romney saying he likes to fire people, Romney saying
how the many cars he owns are American made, his campaign staffer saying that
Romney is like an Etch-a-Sketch, plus Romney's infinite number of flip flops in
public. All this will kill Romney in swing states once ads start to run

7. The really dumb GOP
propaganda - the "Obama is a secret Muslim," the "Obama will ban
guns," and the "Obama is a foreign-born communist" memes -- have
convinced the total idiots and no one else. No one is going to be converted by
these arguments now and the unconverted will be turned off. Obama's been
president for four years. We're not the Soviet Union and the President bailed
out Wall Street. People who can walk and chew gum at the same time realize you
can't be for Wall Street and for Karl Marx simultaneously

8. The GOP bench for the
VP slot is weak and Romney will probably have to pick someone who is more
conservative than he is to secure his unhappy base. This will turn off everyone
else.

9. A lot of Republicans
privately want Romney to lose so they can get this disaster out of the way and
move on to the next heir apparent, like Jeb Bush.

10. Several states really
hate their Republican governors - Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Florida to name
the most important in terms of Electoral votes - and the unpopularity of these
governors means Romney will lose these states.

As it stands now, Obama
will win not only the expected big states – New York, New Jersey, California,
and Massachusetts, but he will almost sweep the Midwest – carrying Wisconsin, Ohio,
Iowa and Michigan.He’ll beat Romney
in Pennsylvania, penetrate the once solid Republican South by capturing Virginia
and North Carolina, heavily beat the Republican in the the Northwest, and
prevail in the often decisive state of Florida.A Republican has to win all of the old Confederacy and Ohio
to have any chance of getting to the White House and I see no way the math
works for Romney in this regard.Basically, the GOP race for 2016 has already begun.

“The
Current is Stronger’: Images of Racial Oppression and Resistance in North Texas
Black Art During the 1920s and 1930s ” in Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D.
Wintz, eds., The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western
Experience (New York:
Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011)

“Dallas,
1989-2011,” in Richardson Dilworth, ed. Cities in American Political History (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011)

(With
John Anthony Moretta and Keith J. Volanto), Keith J. Volonto and Michael
Phillips, eds., The American Challenge: A New History of the United States, Volume II. (Wheaton, Il.: Abigail Press,
2012).

“Texan by
Color: The Racialization of the Lone Star State,” in David Cullen and Kyle
Wilkison, eds., The Radical Origins of the Texas Right (College Station: University of Texas
Press, 2013).

He
is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history
of African American culture, politics and black intellectuals in the Lone Star
State called God Carved in Night: Black Intellectuals in Texas and the World
They Made.

Monday, April 09, 2012

This past week, the right-wing magazine The National Review fired a columnist -- British-born American citizen John Derbyshire -- for posting a column on the libertarian website Taki’s Magazine in which he urged white people to avoid neighborhoods with large numbers of African Americans.

Racist former National Review columnist John Derbyshire in a a pair of "mugshot" photos from his website. Derbyshire, has described himself as a "tolerant racist" believes that black people are less intelligent than white people. ( This staged "mug shot " is from Derbyshire's website at http://www.johnderbyshire.com/.)

Derbyshire intended his column t be satirical. Several writers in the past month discussed “the talk” – the conversation black parents often have with their children on how to avoid being shot by white police officers. Black parents often urge their children to keep both hands in clear view so white officers don’t think they are carrying concealed weapon. They tell their kids to not run away when approached by police. Now, black parents have to warn their offspring to watch out for white neighborhood watch volunteers like George Zimmerman,, who recently fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman described the African American youth as acting in a suspicious manner, even though the child carried nothing more dangerous than Skittles candy and an ice tea. In his racist column "The Talk: Nonblack Version," Derbyshire said that white parents also need to have "the talk" with their children. Whites, Derbyshire said, should urge their children following the following rules:

(10f)Do not settle in a district ormunicipalityrun by black politicians.

(10g)Before voting for a black politician, scrutinizehis/her charactermuch more carefully than you would a white.

(10h)Do not act theGood Samaritanto blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i)If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite butkeep moving.”

Derbyshire then wrote that black people aren’t as smart as white people. “(11)The mean intelligence of blacks ismuch lowerthan for whites. Theleast intelligent ten percentof whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences showin every testof general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countlesseveryday situations. ‘Life is an IQ test.’”

In what was, for him, a generous moment, Derbyshire conceded that some African Americans might not be stupid. In a “pool of 40 million,” he wrote, one can find a smattering of “intelligent, well-socialized black people.” Derbyshire advises white people to form friendships with what he calls IWSBs because such relationships provide whites"an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice." (See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/07/national-review-fires-john-derbyshire_n_1410273.html and http://gawker.com/5899884/racist-john-derbyshire-writes-most-racist-article-possible-pegged-to-trayvon-martin-case).

Derbyshire argued that blacks exhibit higher criminality than white people. “These differences are magnified by the hostility many blacks feel toward whites," he wrote in his column. "Thus, while black-on-black behavior is more antisocial in the average than is white-on-white behavior, average black-on-white behavior is a degree more antisocial yet.”

Derbyshire has openly admitted that he's a racist. “I am not very careful about what I say, having grown up in the era before Political Correctness, and never having internalized the necessary restraints,” he said in one interview. “I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going. Of course, people will still be that way in their hearts, but they will be afraid to admit it, and will be punished if they do admit it. It is already illegal in Britain to express public disapproval of homosexuality–there have been several prosecutions. It will be the same here in 5-10 years, and I shall be out of a job.” (See http://collectedmiscellany.com/2003/11/an-interview-with-john-derbyshire/).

In 2004, Derbyshire bemoaned that it was supposedly no longer socially acceptable to praise and quote the white supremacist writings of eugenicists from the early 20th century. (Eugenicists wanted to promote the "scientific" breeding of racial superiors and to weed out racial inferiors. Eugenicists were widely respected in England, Germany and the United States, getting mandatory sterilization laws passed in places like Virginia, until the Holocaust provided the movement fatally bad public relations.) Political correctness had suppressed open acknowledgement of black inferiority, he wrote:

“Whole areas of academic inquiry are now out of bounds in America, for fear of what they might uncover about human nature. The human sciences are nowadays radioactive, like history or philosophy in a Communist country. Entire disciplines have ceased to exist. Physical anthropology, for example: An informative and interesting book like Carleton Coon's Races of Man could not be published nowadays. The topic is too ‘dangerous" and "insensitive.’ Safer to go into a solid, non-controversial field: Women's Studies, perhaps, or Queer Legal Theory.”

In 2011, Derbyshire suggested that welfare programs formed part of a racial bargain in which whites gave blacks money they didn't deserve so black people wouldn't commit crimes. "“Following the black riots of the 1960s, non-blacks have seen these concessions as an implicit contract or treaty—as non-black America saying to black America: ‘We’ll give you this stuff if you promise not to break our windows,'" Derbyshire wrote. (See http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/04/why-john-derbyshire-hasnt-been-fired-yet/50803/).

Until this past week, Derbyshire's racism didn't bother his editors at The National Review, but "The Talk: Nonblack Version" column crossed some previously invisible line. National Review editor Rich Lowry fired the columnist, making the below statement:

“Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer, I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, or any one of his Straggler columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative.

“[Derbyshire's] latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO [National Review Online] or as someone associated with NR any longer.” (See http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/08/national-review-fires-writer-john-derbyshire-author-of-outlandish-article-on-blacks-racism/#ixzz1rZ9vbaH9

National Review editor Rich Lowry had no problem with Derbyshire's racism until last week. (Photo from http://southernnationalist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Rich-Lowry.jpg).

Lowry's sudden outrage over Derbyshire's never-concealed racism can be dismissed as rank hypocrisy. Racism has rested at the core of The National Review since its founding by William F. Buckley in 1955. In his 1992 book, In Search Of Anti-Semitism, Buckley admitted he cried as an 11-year-old when he wasn't allowed to join four brothers and sisters in a cross-burning staged outside a Jewish resort in Sharon, Connecticut. Buckley brought his quaint, intolerant and verbose views with him when he established his right-wing magazine. The National Review played a pivotal role in establishing the modern conservative movement, creating an iron alliance between libertarians who wanted little or no government regulation of business and traditionalists who wanted to defend and preserve respect for traditional moral authority, as represented by conservative churches.

“Prior to [the founding of the National Review], conservative intellectuals had no central outlet for rigorous debate among themselves, let alone a means of communication to preach to the unconverted,” wrote sociologist Sara Diamond in her book Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements And Political Power In The United States.

As a child, William F. Buckley wept when siblings wouldn't let him join in on a cross-burning outside a Jewish resort. As an adult, he described whites as a more advanced race than African Americans and repeatedly insisted that blacks were less intelligent than whites. (Photo from http://www.theycc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071703.jpg).

As the magazine gained a following among wealthy and influential conservatives, Buckley acquired the power to define conservative orthodoxy and excommunicate those deemed damaging to the cause, such as when he disowned any alliance with the extremist anti-communist John Birch Society. An unembarrassed elitist, the patrician Yale graduate Buckley embodied the right wing of the mainstream, appearing as a frequent guest on television talk shows like Meet The Press and even hosting a Public Broadcasting System television show, Firing Line from 1966 to 1999. (See Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion and Hoover Institution Archives Firing Line Television Program Collection, http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/. Accessed August 23, 2006.

Buckley’s ugly, not-so-hidden secret was his racism. Under Buckley, the National Review abandoned its lip service to libertarianism and adamantly supported the right of Southern states to regulate whether whites and blacks could use the same public transportation, water fountains or bathrooms. The National Review also supported the right of Southern states to deny voting rights to African Americans. In a 1957 editorial headlined “Why the South Must Prevail,” Buckley defended the Dixie denial of black voting rights:

"The central question that emerges . . . is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is Yes – the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.

National Review believes the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority." (See

Sara Diamond, Road to Dominion, 34-35..

In this editorial, Buckley called blacks primitive and suggests that granting African American the vote would threaten civilization, defined as the will of the white community. At the time this was written white civilization expressed itself through included Ku Klux Klan terrorism and the mob mentality that resulted in the savage murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. (Till, 14, was beaten to death in Mississippi in August 1955 by a group of white men after allegedly flirting with a white girl. For more on Emmett Till’s murder, consult a 2004 account written by Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America.) Buckley implictly endorsed such violence

"National Review" founder William F. Buckley was no less racist than some of the worst Southern segregationists, whom he defended, yet long hosted a series on the supposedly liberal PBS network and served as a favorite guest on shows like "Meet The Press." (Photo from http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_OZEW1KPpFOI/TMOg-ghRZkI/AAAAAAAADzo/IXO-vPqVrzE/s1600/williambuckley.jpg).

Buckley’s views not only revealed a deep racism, but an antipathy to democracy itself. Buckley believed that majority rule should be respected only as long as it provides a vehicle for elite objectives. What check would exist to prevent a politically dominant minority from using the “defense of civilization” to rationalize any tyranny doesn’t concern the intellectually sloppy Buckley. Inconvenient dissent, even on the part of the majority, should be squashed as ruthlessly as it was in the Soviet Union Buckley so despised.

Buckley’s views of the Jim Crow South reflected no aberration in the magazine’s general view of blacks, consistently portrayed in the pages of the National Review as mentally backwards. In the 1960s, the National Review also supported the apartheid regime in South Africa and in a June 1964 article cheered the life sentence given African National Congress Leader and future South African President Nelson Mandela. (See

Steve Rendall, “Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads From National Review to the New York Times,” Extra! April 2005, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Website, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2487. Accessed August 23 2006.)

In his book, In Search of Anti-Semitism, Buckley obsessively repeated the contention that blacks are less intelligent than whites and at one point implies that African Americans were better off as slaves in this country than living free in their native continent. (See page 5). In the same book, he laughs at how negligible a black boycott against an author would be, supposedly because so few African Americans read (page 10). "It ought not to be considered racist to remark [on] differences in IQ scoring by blacks," Buckley writes on page 87 of that book, as if the evidence for such alleged differences was beyond dispute.

Buckley's National Review regularly tapped white supremacists advocating eugenics, such as J. Phillipe Rushton and Steven Sailer, the far right-wing journalist, to contribute articles on race. The National Review also leant its prestige to the cause of neo-eugenics, running a rave review on September 12, 1994 issue of Rushton’s book Race, Evolution, and Behavior in which writer Mark Snyderman praised Rushton’s “fearless” thesis that “Orientals are more intelligent, have larger brains for their body size, have smaller genitalia, have less sex drive, are less fecund, work harder and are more readily socialized than Caucasians . . . Caucasians on average bear the same relationship to blacks.”

The National Review's resident race expert Rushton, a British-born Canadian psychology professor, holds a tenure-track professorship at the University of Western Ontario . The Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigates the racist right, has documented the man's history of anti-black thought :

“Although his training is unrelated to biology or genetics, Rushton has not hesitated to spread his controversial opinions far and wide, especially through his major published work, Race, Evolution and Behavior. His findings: black people have larger genitals, breasts and buttocks — characteristics that Rushton alleges have an inverse relationship to brain size and, thus, intelligence. Although the University of Western Ontario has always been careful to defend Rushton’s academic freedom, officials did reprimand him twice for carrying out research on human subjects in 1988 without required prior approval. In the first incident, Rushton surveyed first-year psychology students, asking questions about penis length, distance of ejaculation, and number of sex partners. In the second, he surveyed customers at a Toronto shopping mall, paying 50 white people, 50 black people and 50 Asians five dollars apiece to answer questions about their sexual habits.

“Rushton crossed the political Rubicon in 1989, when he went public, presenting his views on race to an outraged meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Association officials called a press conference the same day to attack what the association’s president called Rushton’s ‘highly suspect’ research. That same year, Rushton set up the Charles Darwin Research Institute in Port Huron, Mich., which is just over the border from London, Ontario, where Rushton teaches, perhaps to avoid breaking Canadian laws on hate speech. The ‘institute’ is basically a website and post office box from which Rushton sells copies of his books . . .”

Racist psychology Professor J. Phillipe Rushton argues that black people are less intelligent than white people, partly because they have larger genitals. He has been a frequent contributor to the National Review. (Photo from http://vho.org/tr/2003/2/Image21.jpg.)

Rushton spoke in 2000 to the racist, anti-immigrant group “American Renaissance. “Whites have, on average, more neurons and cranial size than blacks,” Rushton said. “Blacks have an advantage in sport because they have narrower hips — but they have narrower hips because they have smaller brains.” As the SPLC wrote:

“Since 2002, Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, which has for decades funded dubious studies linking race to characteristics like criminality, sexuality and intelligence. Pioneer has long promoted eugenics, or the ‘science’ of creating ‘better’ humans through selective breeding. Set up in 1937 and headed by Nazi sympathizers, the group strove to ‘improve the character of the American people’ through eugenics and procreation by people of white colonial stock. Pioneer has financed a number of leading race scientists, lavishing large sums each year on those who work to ‘prove’ inherent racial differences that the vast majority of scientists regard as nonsense.” (See http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/jean-philippe-rushton).

One of National Review writer Rushton's many anti-black books. His current "research" aims to prove that women are less intelligent than men (Photo from http://ia600809.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/5/items/olcovers169/olcovers169-L.zip&file=1697773-L.jpg).

Another frequent National Review contributor, Steve Sailer, is a “a well-known promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories.” As documented by Fairness and Accuracy In Media, Sailer has been “a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience. As a principal columnist on the white nationalist website VDare.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the‘New World,'’ Sailer (e.g., 2/23/03; 12/12/01) extols the work of academic racists who say Africans as a group are innately less intelligent than whites or Asians. He is also a staunch defender of the Pioneer Fund, a primary funder for such racist research.” (See http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2487).

Steve Sailer, another frequent "National Review" writer who believes that black people who aren't as smart as white people. (Photo from http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-new-picture.html).

The National Review lavishly praised The Bell Curve, a book that argued that African Americans are an average 15 points lower in intelligence than whites, that the difference stems from biology and not poverty, racism and discrimination, and that no remedial programs like Head Start can make a difference regarding black achievement. The praise was often penned by The National Review was none other than the man we discussed at the beginning of this post, John Derbyshire.

The National Review still embodies the attitudes of a founder who cried when he didn’t get to light a cross to terrify neighborhood Jews. The publication and its online sibling has always held black people in contempt. What made Derbyshire’s recent “talk” any different remains impossible to detect.

“The
Current is Stronger’: Images of Racial Oppression and Resistance in North Texas
Black Art During the 1920s and 1930s ” in Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D.
Wintz, eds., The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western
Experience (New York:
Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011)

“Dallas,
1989-2011,” in Richardson Dilworth, ed. Cities in American Political History (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011)

(With
John Anthony Moretta and Keith J. Volanto), Keith J. Volonto and Michael
Phillips, eds., The American Challenge: A New History of the United States, Volume II. (Wheaton, Il.: Abigail Press,
2012).

“Texan by
Color: The Racialization of the Lone Star State,” in David Cullen and Kyle
Wilkison, eds., The Radical Origins of the Texas Right (College Station: University of Texas
Press, 2013).

He
is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history
of African American culture, politics and black intellectuals in the Lone Star
State called God Carved in Night: Black Intellectuals in Texas and the World
They Made.

Followers

About Me

I received my Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin. My first book, "White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001," won the Texas State Historical Commission's T.R. Fehrenbach Award for best work on Texas history in 2007. My second book, "The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics" will be published by the University of Texas Press March 1, 2010.
My beautiful boy Dominic was born on May 30, 2003. He's an avid reader and loves Harry Potter and Star Wars.
I am a frustrated political liberal, holding Democrats in contempt but too suspicious about the competence of the Green Party to make the leap.
I am married to a wonderful woman named Betsy Friauf who was my editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram 20 years ago. We will be writing books together.
My only appointment television is "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report" and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." I also love to cook when I have the time.